How to manage a Facebook page in more than one language?

If you consider the world to be your market, sooner or later you won’t be able to avoid asking yourself the following question:

in what language should I write my Facebook posts?

Generally, there are four options from which you can choose:

Duplicating the content by translating it to all the languages spoken by your target audience, and/or adjusting manually the post location, therefore enabling audiences to view posts targeted at them in correct language

Publishing one unique post with the relevant translations to all languages spoken by your targets included in the copy of the post

Writing posts only in English (or any other language used by your most important market)

Creating more than one Facebook page, one for each language spoken by your targets

Some time ago here at Roll we were forced to ask ourselves the same question

As you probably already know, our team is based both in London and in Avellino (south of Italy): we are provided with two work environments which really differ from each other. It’s not only due to language and culture differences (and by culture we mainly mean the neverending debate ‘Coffee or tea?’ ;-) ) but also due to the fact that business is being done and relationships with clients and suppliers are sustained in a slightly different manner.

The language targeting, although we have played around with it, hasn’t presented us with any satisfying solution, mainly because the page visually becomes a rather confusing bilingual noise. At the same time we didn't much like the idea of splitting our audience in two in order to direct them exclusively to separate pages to present them with relevant information.

In conclusion, none of the four solutions were a fit good enough to provide us with a optimal solution to the problem. It was a real dilemma - and we only needed to consider relatively simple scenario (Italy/Rest of the world), so we can’t even imagine how much more complicated it gets for companies that offer products and services to several countries both in Europe and rest of the world...

After further experimentation, at the end we settled on what is called Global Page and we strongly recommend it to anyone who is yet to find their satisfying solution to running a successful Facebook page directed at multiple markets.

The solution

Global Page tool lets you keep just one Facebook Page and to deliver the information and custom content to your audience, based on the location and/ or language spoken by its visitors.

That means that your Facebook followers are automatically presented with only relevant to them content, and the ‘local’ page isn’t displayed to the people who don’t match the set parameters.

In Roll Studio case, we've chosen to show the Italian Facebook Page to anyone who chose Italian as their language preset, regardless of their location, and the English Facebook page to everyone else.

In this way, the Italian users view both the posts and the all the relevant to them info (telephone number and address of Avellino office, description of the site) in Italian, while all the other users from all over the world view their content in English.

Quite neat, isn't it?

Think you and your brand need help to communicate better and use your social media in more professional and effective way?